Great SAP Data Deserves a Real CRM
The SAP + Salesforce Connection
WHY SAP + SALESFORCE
SAP is the system most consultants talk themselves out of touching, and that’s exactly why it’s worth having someone in your corner who’s built more than one SAP Salesforce sync that actually holds up under a real quote to cash process. We’ve been inside SAP long enough to have done it two different ways, a SOAP and SQL view approach, and a bidirectional MuleSoft Anypoint build moving data through SAP’s IDoc format. SAP isn’t the only enterprise system we live inside either, we connect Salesforce to everything from Epicor to Sage and everything in between. If you want the wider picture of how we work across every ERP we touch, the full breakdown lives on our manufacturing page.
WHAT MOVES BETWEEN SAP AND SALESFORCE
Done right, an SAP Salesforce sync covers the full quote to cash picture, not just an order number. In the integrations we’ve built, that’s meant quotes moving from Salesforce into SAP and generating real orders and invoices the moment they’re accepted, product, pricing, and inventory data moving back the other way including region specific pricing and both on hand and on order inventory, and analytical data landing in Salesforce dashboards on a schedule sales and executives can actually trust. All of it moving on its own, not retyped by someone checking two systems against each other.
QUOTES THAT BUILD THEMSELVES, DON’T NEED RETYPING
At Hörmann Flexon Doors, the SAP connection runs underneath a Salesforce CPQ setup that takes complex door measurements and turns them into priced, professional quotes in seconds. Underneath that front end sits a full bidirectional MuleSoft Anypoint integration moving IDocs in both directions, including a 300 field order line sync, a different kind of build than the SOAP and SQL view approach we used elsewhere. IDocs are one of SAP’s oldest, most established data exchange formats, we’re just moving them through a modern MuleSoft layer instead of the older route. Peter Burnham, Hörmann’s VP of Sales and Marketing, said: “Our decision to work with BlackIron Group to help us implement Salesforce was definitely a good one. They have helped us each step of the way to understand Salesforce’s multiple products, and to configure the tools to represent our unique business processes.”
WHEN THE DATA CAN’T WAIT A WEEK
For Massanois, a wine distributor where a vintage that sells out is gone for good, that’s meant hourly refreshed reports and dashboards pulling product, sales, invoice, and inventory data straight out of SAP Business One into Salesforce, so the sales team can see what’s actually on hand and what’s already on order before they make a pricing or promotional call. Dewayne Martin, Managing Partner at Massanois, put it simply: “BlackIron Group has been a trusted partner for Massanois for over a decade. We have grown on the Salesforce platform, and BlackIron Group has helped us each step of the way.”
SEEING THE OBJECTIVE TRUTH
Zeochem runs a bidirectional integration where quotes built in Salesforce generate SAP orders and invoices automatically the moment they’re accepted, with analytical data flowing back so sales reps and executives are working off the same numbers instead of two different stories. Jennifer Rosenberg, Marketing Director, says it plainly: “With the integration and analytical capabilities of Salesforce, we can see and manage all of our critical sales, inventory and quoting data. We listen to the data. The information we have at our fingertips is truly the objective truth.” Black Iron also added e-signature into Zeochem’s quoting process, which sped up quote acceptance and helped close more deals.
THE PART SAP DOESN’T HAND YOU
Here’s something most firms won’t tell you upfront. SAP’s own API doesn’t arrive as a working connection, it arrives as a toolkit, and someone still has to build the actual endpoints on the SAP side before any of it can talk to Salesforce. That build has to come from whoever manages SAP on your end, or an SAP partner who handles that side of things, it’s specialized SAP development and not something we do ourselves. We ran into exactly this on Zeochem’s integration, and it’s worth planning for before a project starts, not discovering halfway through.
P.S. if you found this useful, check out our full manufacturing website!
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